


Karkat and Feferi's Guide To Escaping Fate, Taking Shit and Falling in Love

by Anonymous



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternia, Developing Relationship, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-15
Updated: 2020-09-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:48:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26474425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: In which two young trolls destined to die for the color of their blood meet clandestinely to say 'fuck that shit'. Featuring emotional constipation, bloodletting, bad online party invitations and one Sollux Captor.
Relationships: Feferi Peixes and Sollux Captor and Karkat Vantas, Feferi Peixes/Karkat Vantas
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14
Collections: Fanfic Anonymous





	Karkat and Feferi's Guide To Escaping Fate, Taking Shit and Falling in Love

She’s remarkably composed for the situation, you think. Her features are still and her posture is regal and steady. Her hands are firm and cold when she grasps your cheek softly in greeting. 

“Karkat.” She says, and you pull away from her hand, stare up at her and her towering horns forming hills under the dark cloak she’s wearing. 

Her lookstubs are bright and observant and at the edges of the cornea, a ring of pink shines out like a beacon. 

It’s almost dawn, the scorching sun sending warning tickles playing across your bare face, but all you can feel is the burning hot of her lookstubs on your own. 

You touch your cheek, see Feferi in a glance, look backwards into your shadowy mess of a hive, and promptly throw up. 

You and Feferi are sitting in your cramped nutrition-block, an old piece of foam wedged against the window to muffle your voices. No such thing as too paranoid, both of you know.

Her composure has crumbled in the privacy of your company. She’s curled into the too-small chair across from yours, her long arms jutting her elbows into the tabletop. Her fingers trace patterns on her mug of coffee absentmindedly, while she talks to you of something that warrants a constant whisper. It brings a hush over the room, a barrier between the two of you and the rest of the world. You reach out and take her hand into your own. 

“Why?” You ask again, and she looks up at you with bloodshot lookstubs and damp cheeks. 

“I’m not-.” She takes in a shuddering breath and starts again. “I can’t beat her, nobody can.” Her shoulders tighten with resolve, and you revise your lingering thoughts dubbing her a coward. You think you understand; you smile at her comfortingly. The unfamiliar expression stings your cheeks, and you’re sure it looks forced, but she smiles back anyway, a thin-lipped grimace that makes her look older than her nearly 9 sweeps. 

“You’re not weak or any of that shit for this. I guess I want to tell you that.” You tell her. “I think it’s kind of brave, actually. Not just going ‘fuck it’ and dying for some old tradition’s sake.” 

Her throat moves, and you can tell she’s trying not to sob. 

“I just don’t want to die, Karkat.” She says, desperately, searching your lookstubs for understanding. 

You swallow back something in your throat. Despite sweeps of training against it, you feel your lookstubs moisten. 

“Yeah. Me neither.” You surprise yourself by meaning it. 

She’s been camped in your hive for 3 nights at this point. Ascension is in a perigee, and two of the three streams on your shitty old telegrub have a constant countdown in the corner, with silhouettes of honorable adult teal bloods holding briefcases and guns festively superimposed over the corners. 

Every hour, it’ll interrupt whatever programming is on to state the remaining hours before a crop of 9 year olds ascend to their exciting and busy new adult lives serving the empire. _Or get culled, or enslaved, or maybe lobotomized and strung up in the helm_ , goes unsaid.

“Oh shut the fuck up already!” Feferi screams, and hurls a dull sickle at the telegrub. It flickers, emits a few garbled noises, and dies, dripping stale fluid onto your hive’s floor. 

She stands there, panting, her shoulders raised and her teeth bared. She looks ready to snap a spine, but you just hold up your hands pacifyingly, and she shrinks back, her lookstubs shuttered and her chin trembling. 

“It’s okay,” you say quietly, after checking behind the curtains to make sure no one had heard. You stop the flow of liquid from the wound and wipe down the floor. “It was a pretty shit telegrub anyway.” 

She gives you a look so grateful you think you blush, and leaves the room with the turn of a heel. 

You spend the next night in a quieter hive, reliving the face Feferi had made in your thinkpan. 

“Tell me. Tell me how to survive.” You wake, terrified and already reaching for a sickle. Feferi grabs your arms and holds them against the side of the coon without blinking. Her lookstubs sparkle in the softened rays of mid-day sunlight managing to get past your curtains, and her hair is knotted and frizzy, long having devolved from a dignified black cloak upon her arrival into what could really only be described as a squeak-beast nest. 

You think somewhat deliriously that she’s the prettiest troll you’ve ever seen. 

It’s not enough to keep you from growling at her and trying to sink a little further in your shallow coon. She watches as you hit the back of your head on the coon-bottom with a muffled curse. 

Unimpressed, your new hive-mate pulls you out of the coon by your wrists, forcing you, coughing and swearing like a clown, to sit upright. 

You try to free your hands to cover your chest, but she holds them firm, looking over you like a stern and disappointed lusus.

“Feferi!” And you _don’t_ shriek the next part, it’s more of a loud hiss really: “I’m fucking naked!” 

Much to your humiliation, this seems to improve her mood. She flashes a grin full of razor-sharp teeth and giggles.

“I sure hope so! You’re supposed to take your clothes off when you pail, y’now Karcrab.” 

You flush and you wriggle out of her grip. You grab a few ratty towels and attempt to wipe and cover yourself at the same time, hopping from one walkpad to another. 

Her lookstubs track your movements in a way that can’t help but ring as distinctly predatory to your overactive nerves. After having stopped the worst of the dripping and tying a towel around your waist, you turn, exasperated. 

“Could you fucking stop it with the lazer-lookstubs? And when I’m getting dressed, good fucking riddance you people are perverted-“

“Stop,” she commands, her lookstubs flashing with barely contained _something_ , her fangs peeking from her lips. 

“What? I’m not wrong, CA was hornier than-“ The flash of her lookstubs becomes more apparent and you realize with a sinking bloodpusher that she’s trying not to cry. 

“Don’t talk about Eridan.” She warns, and you nod bashfully. Your throat feels like sandpaper. A drop of slime falls on the floor, and you can’t bring yourself to care, because in 23 nights you’ll be dead if you aren’t lucky, a stowaway if you are, a test subject at the worst, and far, far away from the hive of your childhood for all of it. 

“He doesn’t know, does he?” You ask quietly, because there isn’t really a _good_ way to address the matter, but you have to know. 

“We haven’t spoken in perigrees, he just took to feeding Mom itself. We avoided each other.” 

You swallow. It was probably a good thing, but still. It couldn’t be easy. 

Then again, maybe it was. Eridan was kind of a dick at the best of times. Your responses to his messages had dribbled to a trickle of uncharacteristic one-worders and excuses over the last sweep. You couldn’t stay in contact with someone like _him_ with what you were thinking, planning in vague shapes in the dead of day, too afraid to commit to paper. 

You’re left staring at each other; her hair is frazzled and tangled like she’d been twisting her claws in it, and there’s the bruise of emotion surrounding her lookstubs. She has freckles, you notice, dusted across her cheeks. Her Condescension must have them edited out, or use makeup, or maybe they faded with the eons of tyranny. 

Her face is familiar objectively, but in that moment she looks nothing like her ancestor. You tell her so, because the silence is edging on uncomfortably and you have to say _something_. 

It’s just an observation, but she nearly flies at you. Her skin is hard and cold against yours. You think she’s going to crush your ribs. _You’re cullbait anyway_ , you think somewhat deliriously. You move your arms the best you can to return the embrace. There’s a squeak as air is forced out of your breathe-sacs, and then she’s releasing you and apologizing profusely. Your vision spots as you gasp in air, and the sound of her frantic voice and pressure of her cool hands on your cheek make you grin a little in spite of it all. 

“You’re still going to help me, you know,” she says later that night as she watches you fold ratty kitchen towels and put them into a cabinet. It’s something for your hands to do, to keep you from going crazy while you wait to die. The hive seems increasingly suffocating, and you’re not sure if it’s just the addition of another, rather imposing troll in a place barely built for one or, if it’s knowing that you’re a milkbeast sitting in the pen before execution. 

“Help you with what?” You ask, because you’re bored, and boredom makes you reckless, ready to poke at questions you don’t want the answers to, to anger trolls you don’t want to lose. 

Feferi doesn’t take the bait. 

“You know what I’m talking about, Karkat.” She sounds tired, and it’s no surprise, considering you have the cheapest sopor on market and it’s barely enough for your stunted limbs. But she doesn’t waver in her insistence, in her assurance. You think you’d admire her resolve, if it wasn’t being used against you. Perhaps you still do. 

You don’t respond, but you put the folded towel down and don’t pick up another. 

“I don’t have a plan. I was going to face the drones and die.” You lie. You turn to leave the room. “Sorry for wasting a long fucking journey on your part, I guess.”

Feferi is blocking the doorway, and for the first time, she looks angry at _you_. She grabs your shoulder as you try to squeeze by and nearly slams you into the nearest wall. There’s a crack, and your vision becomes speckled as disturbed plaster falls gently on your eyelashes. You blink, and for a second, her lookstubs aren’t yellow but foggy pale as the dust covers your retina. You blink again, wince, and she’s back, nearly snarling at you. 

“Do you hear me?” She asks, studying your gaze as if trying to decipher whether you had developed a concussion of sorts from the impact. 

“Crystal.” You respond, and the plaster tastes like ash on your tongue. 

“Great!” She says, and beams at you in a vicious display of shining white needle-teeth. “So listen to this: _stop fucking with me, Karcrab_!”

“I’m not-“ you stupidly begin to protest, but another crack in the wall under her claws makes you cough again, painfully. “Cut it the fuck out, for fuck’s sake, CC!” 

Your lookstubs sting. You tell yourself it’s the plaster. 

“It’s not going to work-“ you croak finally. “-you really ought to have asked Sollux.” 

Her anger fizzles from a wildfire to a match, her shoulders and mouth slumping in surrender. 

“I’m asking you, Karkat, because whether you want to admit it or not, you’ve made it this far. That’s not easy. It’s crazy, if you really think about it.”

“I try not to.” You mutter. 

“Well, it’s time to start.” She replies, beginning to pace aimlessly. 

“Did it help you?” You ask bitterly. 

She turns, frowns. “What?” 

Your spit tastes sour on your tongue. 

“Karkat?” Feferi asks, ceasing her pacing in a jolt of statue-like stillness. A cloud devours the moons through the window, and in the weak light her skin looks nearly-black. She looks like a statue. _This is crazy, this is crazy, this is fucking crazy._

You swallow thickly. “Yeah?” 

“We’re not in the tide-pools anymore. We swim or we die.” 

“You’re loosing me.” You comment, but you feel that ever-present worry creasing into the skin between your eyebrows, because she isn’t, not really. 

“Stop treading water and fucking swim!” She exclaims. “Because I can’t fucking bear to watch you drown.” 

It takes you a moment to realize that the unnatural pink glowing on her cheeks are tears. 

“Okay.” You say finally. “Okay. But you’ve survived too. Got any ideas?” 

“Let me think.” Her lookstubs cloud in concentration. She’s not wearing her goggles; she must have left them behind, you realize. You are all leaving so much behind, nowanights. 

For a moment there’s only the sound of prairie grass rustling outside and her chewing her nails restlessly, an atrocious and highly irritating habit you haven’t bothered to try and stop because you know your nervous tics are even worse. 

Then her entire demeanor snaps up, like the splitting of coniferous fauna under lightning, but in reverse. 

“Karcrab, Karkat, you’re a genius!” She gasps. 

“I am? Sure. What are you talking about in particular, though? Just for the sake of everpitying specificity.” 

“You told me to ask Sollux, remember?” She says, words all rushed and tumbling over each other in her excitement. 

“Well, that’s what we’ll do. If anyone would be able to do it, it’d be him! I mean, do you pawnestly believe he doesn’t already have a plan to escape ascension?” 

Sollux escaping had always been a sort of inevitability in your version of events, in some genius way or another, but he has always been less of a troll than a bunch of volatile miracles bundled together tightly into the shape of one. 

“But,” you question, frowning. “Why the hell would he help us?” 

Feferi looks at you as if you had pointed to the moons and asked what they were. Or, in short, she looks at you like you’re a natural wonder by the mere feat of surviving so long so being so very stupid. 

“Because he’s our friend.” She declares, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. A moment, and then she adds. “Because you helped me.” 

The message is tacky to the point of an obvious underlying message. 

It has to be sent as a file because after all this time the most widely used messaging platform on Alternia still hasn’t implemented an image-in-chat function. There is something almost charming in the developer’s incompetence. If those chucklefucks can make it, so can you. 

Once opened, after it has been thoroughly scanned and doubted and double-checked for malicious action, because this is Sollux Captor of course, reads this; YOU ARE INVITED! PARTY AT MY HIVE, with some shitty compressed jpegs of olive-blooded glamour models and helium-spheres completed with a healthy dose of ocular-searing glitter-font. 

Coming from you, it is the most fucking obvious cry for discreet help in the empire. Both you and Feferi are rather proud of your hideous work, so you break open the box of cheap chocolate confectionery you have been hoarding under your water-depositor since forever and hold a small, sugary feast. They’re stale from age and moisture and Feferi has surely had far better, but it’s the ambience of the moment more than anything you can really taste that settles pleasant and deep in your bones. 

You wait for Sollux to arrive. This he does, before the two of you had predicted and in an atypically understated fashion. Flair is the first sacrifice to be made, for trolls like you and him. 

“I was beginning to think I’d have to intervene of my own accord.” He greets you in a monotone when you open the hive-door. He knocks his head on the frame, in the same place where Feferi’s horns had nicked it before; there’s an indent in the soft arboreal-meat where troll and hive had met. 

“Hey to you too, asshole.” you grunt. I will not cry, you promise yourself sternly. You mostly succeed, you think. 

You don’t bother asking him how he knows where you live. His creepy-omniscient smitck is almost comforting in its familiarity, and you’re not going to pretend it wasn’t convenient in this instance. 

“Oh.” He says when Feferi tackles him into a rib-bruising hug. This might just be the noise of the air being forced out of his breathe-sacs, but his eyebrows are raised in friendly surprise in an expression that says more than he means it to. 

“You too?” He asks when he manages to recover enough air to speak. She nods firmly. “Awesome.” He comments with a grin. Feferi beams. 

“So.” You begin, leaning against the wall with your arms crossed over your chest. “What’s the plan wise-guy?” 

He looks to you, then to Feferi. You swear you can see the gears turning behind his blank bicolor lookstubs. “Give me a moment.” He says. 

‘A moment’ ends up being roughly 40 minutes. 

“It’s a long-shot,” he explains, gesturing broadly with his hands. “But with her, it might just might be possible.” 

You frown. “What were you going to do before?” The psionic sends you a withering look, conveyed rather impressively through his eyebrows alone. 

“Hit us.” Feferi says fearlessly. You feel your flesh-pads become moist against the scratchy woolbeast material of your sweater.

“So every ship and computer built in the empire, at least all the legal ones, have this built-in backdoor, one that can only be used by permission of the Condesce herself.” 

You look to Feferi. You know where this is going. 

“How is it enforced?” Feferi asks, yet again worrying her nail against her fangs. 

“A hand-stub prick. Any blood will do, actually, but that’s what it’s designed for.” Sollux answers.

“Couldn’t any fuschia use it, then?” You question. 

“Nah.” There’s not a ‘p’ to pop in the word, but if there was he’d do it. The smug motherfucker. “The heiresses, they’re fuschias, right, but they’re still different trolls. They have their own genetic print.” He looks towards Feferi. “But Feferi-“

“I’m her descendant. We’re the same.” She finishes, lookstubs somehow both incredibly distant and near. 

Sollux would have ripped you a new one for the interruption, but from Feferi he just tints yellow and becomes suddenly very interested in the cheap plastic of your desk. “Yeah, right. Genetically speaking.” 

He says the last part like a promise, and without speaking you gently grab her hand to second the motion. She smiles, closed-lipped and soft. 

It seems almost too easy to be true. 

“What do you want?” You ask finally. 

“What the fuck do you mean?” He asks, but it’s more distracted than hostile. He’s tapping his fingers rapidly against the surface of your cheap table and you could swear it’s in time with the rapid beat of your bloodpusher. 

“In return for you telling us all this, obviously.” 

He looks at you like he’s stupid, and he might look at everyone like that but it still hurts. 

“Isn’t it obvious, KK? I’m coming with you guys.”

It’s a more difficult plan than it sounds, because Sollux is a genius and a miracle but he isn’t invisible like you and Feferi are, has things like records and neighbors and an apartment in a densely populated lowblood communal hive. 

He tells you this solemnly, and it makes every vein in your body clench painfully. 

“I’ll figure it out.” He says, and stakes out his space as the entirety of your admittedly small respite block, doing inscrutable things with the cracked, oozing corpse of your former telegrub. 

“It could be worse.” Feferi reminds you hopefully. “He’s obsessed with not being tracked, remember? He can’t have that much to erase.” 

She’s right, but you worry restlessly anyway because your thinkpan doesn’t know how to do anything else. 

The next sunset, nine days before Ascension, he settles his lanky form in your too-small grubblock and announces calmly that he is going to fake his own death. 

“Okay.” Feferi accepts this declaration, “How can we help?”

“I’m going to need you to drain me of just enough blood that I don’t die but the drones will be convinced that I did.” He answers calmly, nursing a chipped mug of cheap bean-juice. 

You don’t protest, because when the choice is something awful and death, you’d rather pretend the awful thing is something mundane and hope you begin to believe it’s true. 

Sollux uses his psionics to heat a sickle to sterility and Feferi bleeds him until his bicolored lookstubs slip shut with exhaustion. She drains him until this point, and then she drains him some more. 

You don’t look. You’ve never liked the sight of blood. 

It’s a race against time. Sollux had downed all the thinkpan-anti-throbbing substance in your cupboard, but that wasn’t much, and even with it in his system blood coagulates fast. 

Feferi straps the water-jugs to her back and heads in the direction of Sollux’s hiveblock in some foreign urban center as quickly as she can. They have a sickly mustard sheen that isn’t solely from age. Every twenty minutes, she must stop to check the state of the liquid. When it begins to flake on the edges forwards the top, she will stage the scene. 

Normally, dying isn’t this hard, but before Ascension, violence among nine-sweepers grinds to a halt and every death and disappearance are suddenly analyzed by the drones. 

What the three of you are doing is exactly why— can’t have trolls escaping ascension, after all. 

She returns splattered like a clown-church and panting in a manner atypical of seadwellers in their physical nigh-invincibility. 

You don’t think it’s the exertion that has her regal shoulders shaking like weak hive-foundations in a plains-storm, but you don’t say anything. Glass is the weakest foundation of them all. 

Sollux wakes almost a night later, sluggish and desperate for water to an almost comical extent. The three of you can only afford a night for him to recover in the hive. The nearest ascension-point is a long ways from your hive—everything is. You suspect that had kind of been the point. 

Crab-dad is affectionate towards the three of you with a fervor bordering on maniacal. Sollux doesn’t have the physical strength to protest, and you and Feferi lack the emotional sort. The lusus might not be able to speak, but he understands enough of what the three of you say to know what’s going on. 

Your lookstubs are always moist around the edges, these nights. You wonder when you had gotten this old. It feels a little as if the sweeps have passed when your back was turned, sneaking behind you so you don’t get the chance to say a proper goodbye. 

You give yourself lots of chances in those last nights. Words are never enough, you learn. Nothing is. 

Feferi watches you, silent and sad. More than once, you sleep without sopor, the two of you curled up in Crab-Dad’s hold and each other’s arms. 

She understands you in that awful and tired way that no one deserves to. There’s not a condolence that really means anything, but her cool skin against yours and her breath on your cheek comes as close to a reparation as it gets. 

The three of you set out. Feferi has to carry Sollux in her arms like a pale damsel from a trashy movie. He is vulnerable and soft, like those pretty actors in the posters and magazines, but the pity of his form is wrong, pooled in all the wrong places. 

He is not fragile like a fantasy—he is fragile like a bomb. 

Feferi is wearing the cloak she had when she arrived. The two of them are a painting. You try to think which one, but you can’t. Perhaps you had only seen it in a dream. 

Sollux is near-drunk in this state, giggling in harsh, raspy breaths at just about anything. 

It’s not fair to blame him, he’s the only reason the three of you have a shot at anything, but your anger has never been contained neatly to _fairness_. 

“I don’t suppose you could fly us there.” You mutter irritably as Sollux hums something catchy and nerve-biting into the groove of Feferi’s neck. 

“No,-n-n-no, stupid.” He laughs, and it’s a round, bubbly thing, all his sharp edges rounded from delirium. He waves a thin wrist in the air. “No juice. I’ve got, I’ve got…” His neck slumps back into Feferi’s skin, his speech becoming unintelligible.

Feferi shoots you a chastising look, and you try to look anywhere but her stern face. It’s hard--these plains stretch hopelessly into the distance in a way that makes your lookstubs want to shrivel out of their sockets. 

Ascension point is something out of nothing—you couldn’t have imagined it. 

More trolls than you’ve ever seen float about each other like wary satellites. Nobody draws blood—that is the strangest thing—blood will be drawn today, but not by them. 

You’re surprised by these trolls, not because they are angry, but because they are angry in a flavor that is familiar to your tongue. 

Feferi is tugging your arm and whispering in your ear, but you can’t hear, all you can see is a crowd of trolls with something of you in their faces. 

She leans down, cool breath on your face, and the moment shatters. 

In her lookstubs, you can see your reflection, can see someone you are beginning to pity in the shape of someone you haven’t quite realized how much you hate. 

The biggest problem turns out to be that neither you nor Feferi can fly. The entrance you’re looking for is near the top of the ship, a good 400 or so feet in the air by your guess. 

Your bloodpusher sinks like a stone. Sollux, still weak and clumsy like a pupa, has gone unusually quiet. You look over to see him staring at the distant top of the massive ship, and his eyes are still as unreadable as ever but you think that perhaps you can see something hiding behind them. This _something_ looks a lot like fear, and then shifts into resignation. His lips are as straight and flat as the horizon on the Alternian plains, harsh and sad in the way of an audible sob from a troll with too little water for tears. 

“I’m too weak for me, my, fuck, powers. Psionics.” His lips are clumsy around the words like a bad dub. “I’ll burn up.” 

“We failed.” Feferi whispers, and you don’t think she meant for you to hear but you do. 

You know Sollux better than her. “Sollux, no.” You choke out. 

His gangly arms encircle two waists and the three of you are lifted with a blue-red lurch. A shriek whistles in the air, and you’re not sure if it’s Feferi’s or yours. Probably both. 

Everything is a rush of buzzing psionics and then humming ship-bowels, and the next moment you’re thinking straight enough to clearly remember the three of you are piled in some disused metal closet of a room. Sollux is lying across the two of you, his head in your lap. Stringy black hair hangs over his face, but you can see the mustard blood drying in a path from his eyes. 

This room is a far cry from the familiar biotechnological _hum_ of the rest of the ship, disconcerting quiet settling on your shoulders like a weight. 

Your hand is circled around one of Sollux’s wrists, and he’s twice your height but it circles the thin thing like a twig. Between the sharp outline of bone you can feel a steady, slow thump. It feels like a thing you can _breathe_. 

The adult troll supervisors don’t come down here. No drones, either. It’s cold and hard and you think that you could die and never be found, that your corpses would lay undiscovered for eternities in this exile’s death. 

Sollux can’t use his psionics anymore. Can’t see either. Feferi says maybe he’s just tired, just sick, that it’ll come back. _You were like that before, right? You were just unwell, that’s all._

He just shakes his head. _I know_ . He says. _I just know._

You ask him what it’s like, how he _knows_. His shoulder is sharp and narrow against your cheek, but you cling to him like a pupa to a lusus. 

Sollux seems relieved, almost. It’s freezing but he’s stripped off his sign and shirt and wrapped Feferi’s shawl around his middle like a tunic. 

You ask what burning out feels like, and he takes so long to respond that you think he’d passed out again, but finally you hear him release a quiet sigh full of an emotion existing just beyond words. _It felt like everything,_ he tells you quietly. _It felt like nothing else._

Feferi is the only one who seems alright, unbothered by the chill or the sterile _wrongness_ of it all. 

It’s hard to forget that she’s not like you, not like Sollux, when you’re shivering and he’s half-dead and she’s looking like something off a glamour mag. 

You don’t resent her for it, and this surprises you more than anything else. You think, mostly, that you just wish you didn’t have to hurt so damned bad. 

Sollux gets better, in a way- Feferi doesn’t give him much of a choice. Sometimes you forget that he’s blind, that his eyes are sunken and hollow where they once hummed red and blue. 

He’s still Sollux, still the most infuriatingly brilliant troll you’ve ever heard of. You want to tell the whole damn empire that, tell the helmsman retrieval unit-- “ _This is Sollux Captor and he’s absolutely fucking brilliant. This is Sollux and he’s my best fucking friend._ ” 

Only Sollux can make legendary psionics into something of a footnote. He’s made up of so many miraculous things. 

The ship-computers still run down in the metal bowels, in theory, but they’re like atrophied veins, hardened arteries to a failing bloodpusher. 

Only a miracle could have used them for anything, much less dig through archaic classifieds. _Sollux makes miracles look easy_ , you think, and you are so overwhelmingly relieved he’s on your side that you could faint. 

“Karkat, I...we found him.” She’s shaking her head softly, like she’s trying to disagree with her own words. 

“Who?” You ask. Your throat is suddenly so dry it’s painful, and Feferi’s head is swaying from side to side like prairie grass. 

“Your ancestor, Karcrab. But it’s not, he’s not-.” She stops, the words seeming trapped in her throat. 

“He’s dead.” You fill in. The words don’t sting, not really. You don’t know him, except to know that he’s some mirror of you, and the image of your own death stopped being shocking when you were four. “He’s dead, Feferi.” You repeat, and really you think you already knew, could feel it, that you were truly, completely alone. 

She nods, once, lookstubs shiny, and you’re torn between anger and adoration, because he’s _you_ , nobody ought to be a bigger mess about it than yourself, but here she is, she’s _her_ , and she’s trembling like a pupa with a stubbed knee. 

You wonder what you’re feeling is how Aradia would feel, if she could feel at all, like an audience member to her own demise. 

She shakes her head faster, fists balling. A strand of hair sticks to her wet cheek, and you can almost feel it like a phantom sense, feel yourself brushing it away like a memory. 

“That’s not it, that’s.” She swallows. “She killed him.” And she says the words like she means to say ‘I killed you’, and the shape of the intention is visible even in the result. 

“Oh,” you say, and you think you know why she’s crying now, because she can feel it in her hands like a terrible memory. Your chest hurts, your throat hurts, and the rest feels so fucking numb. 

You sit, legs folded up. She falls beside you without a word, slouched so that she can slot her cheek along your shoulder. “This sucks.” she whispers, voice caught. A few minutes pass, her breath cool on your bare neck. You’re not scared, and maybe you’re going crazy like Gamzee, because all you feel is sadness and anger and something else that you can’t name but can picture. It looks like this; Feferi’s laugh, a cold hand in yours, deaths that feel like memories, two hearts beating because they hurt too much to stop, like looking fate in the eye and saying ‘actually? fuck this’, like seeing yourself in someone else’s lookstubs. 

“Yeah. Sucks harder than a hooker on rent-day.” Your hand finds hers like a magnet, feels the claws against your skin. You fold your fingers and lie them in her palm. She closes around them, gentle as moonlight on the prairie. 

“Maybe we were meant to kill each other.” You think out-loud. “Two copies taking care of each other, little clones of someone never meant to exist and someone who always has and will. Violent fucking serendipity.” 

She shrugs, except her shoulder is against your chest so she just ends up poking you. “I don’t know, Karkat--” you can feel her breath on your cheek and her pulse against your fingers, and you think that maybe you don’t need to breath ever again, can just feel it through her, “--I’m not the romance expert in the room, but that doesn’t sound mussel- I mean, much, like serendipity, at least not by your standards.”

“Yeah? What the hell would I say serendipity is, according to your esteemed expertise?” 

She laughs softly. Cold breath out, warm air in. _Again, and again, and again._

“I think it’s what we’re doing right now.” Then she leans over and kisses you on the lips, just a brush of her face against yours. It’s not even long enough for you to close your lookstubs, but you’re glad, because through the gray metal of the ship-bowels, you could swear you see stars. 

  
  
  



End file.
